Tag Archives: Stanley Fish

The problem with arguments is that everyone who has a view (i.e., everyone) considers themselves an expert. Stanley Fish lends credence to this view. In a recent op-ed on Historians Against Trump, he writes:

But there’s very little acknowledgment of limitations and subjectivity in what follows, only a rehearsal of the now standard criticisms of Mr. Trump, offered not as political opinions, which they surely are, but as indisputable, impartially arrived at truths: “Donald Trump’s presidential campaign is a campaign of violence: violence against individuals and groups; against memory and accountability, against historical analysis and fact.” How’s that for cool, temperate and disinterested analysis?

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that this view of Mr. Trump is incorrect; nor am I saying that it is on target: only that it is a view, like anyone else’s. By dressing up their obviously partisan views as “the lessons of history,” the signatories to the letter present themselves as the impersonal transmitters of a truth that just happens to flow through them. In fact they are merely people with history degrees, which means that they have read certain books, taken and taught certain courses and written scholarly essays, often on topics of interest only to other practitioners in the field.

This strikes me as very confused. In the first place, what on earth are “political opinions”? Are the on par with opinions about matters of taste? (pizza is great!) If so, then indeed, maybe Fish is right. But I doubt this is what he means. Political opinions, after all, include all sorts of things that are fact-based. One example would be: “we should do this because it worked in the past.” The test of the acceptability of this opinion would be whether this indeed worked well in the past. That’s a factual question. Historians deal, allegedly, with such past-tense factual questions. In makes perfect sense that they weigh in.

On another level. Fish has hugely exaggerated the force of the argument from expert opinion (of which this is an example). Experts, which historians surely are at some level, are called upon (by reasonable people) to help with questions that fall within their expertise. For this reason, we call upon doctors to comment on political matters when those have bearing. We can call upon historians to answer questions about history. It does not mean, nor would anyone anywhere suggest, that such opinions are the same thing as truth itself than cannot be objected to.

Dawkins and Pinker replied that you ask them to show you their evidence — the basis of their claim to be taken seriously — and then you show them yours, and you contrast the precious few facts they have with the enormous body of data collected and vetted by credentialed scholars and published in the discipline’s leading journals. Point, game, match.

Not quite. Pushed by Hayes, who had observed that when we accept the conclusions of scientific investigation we necessarily do so on trust (how many of us have done or could replicate the experiments?) and are thus not so different from religious believers, Dawkins and Pinker asserted that the trust we place in scientific researchers, as opposed to religious pronouncements, has been earned by their record of achievement and by the public rigor of their procedures. In short, our trust is justified, theirs is blind.

It was at this point that Dawkins said something amazing, although neither he nor anyone else picked up on it. He said: in the arena of science you can invoke Professor So-and-So’s study published in 2008, “you can actually cite chapter and verse.”

With this proverbial phrase, Dawkins unwittingly (I assume) attached himself to the centuries-old practice of citing biblical verses in support of a position on any number of matters, including, but not limited to, diet, animal husbandry, agricultural policy, family governance, political governance, commercial activities and the conduct of war. Intellectual responsibility for such matters has passed in the modern era from the Bible to academic departments bearing the names of my enumerated topics. We still cite chapter and verse — we still operate on trust — but the scripture has changed (at least in this country) and is now identified with the most up-to-date research conducted by credentialed and secular investigators.

Really slowly: the list of items Fish mentions here (in bold) are prescriptions based on divine commands. The chapter and verse Dawkins refers to are descriptions based on arguments. They're just reported second hand.

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It's been a long time since I've read Stanley Fish's column in the New York Times Online. One reason is that I'm semi-boycotting the Times and their paywall; the other reason is that Fish is a terrible columnist. Thankfully he's no longer the only type representing the humanities, so it's safe to go back there.

A favorite theme of his is that philosophy and other such things are abstract activities that have little to do with what one actually believes. He often drives this point home with sophistical equivocations on the meaning of "philosophy," etc. A quick look at the archive here supports this notion–or rather supports the notion that this is what most bothers me about Fish.

Equivocations such as his are such an easy thing to spot; and his general view is such a shallow one that you'd think, well, I guess you wouldn't think.

The question is whether religion should be considered philosophy. For a long time, of course, philosophy was included under religion’s umbrella, not in the modern sense that leads to courses like “The Philosophy of Religion,” but in the deeper sense in which religious doctrines are accepted as foundational and philosophy proceeds within them. But for contemporary philosophers religious doctrines are not part of the enterprise but a threat to it. The spirit is as Andrew Tyler (38) describes it: “to be skeptical, critical and independent so that you’re not so easily duped and frightened into submission by religious dogma.” Courses in the philosophy of religion tacitly subordinate religion to philosophy by subjecting religion to philosophy’s questions and standards. Strong religious believers will resist any such subordination because, for them, religious, not philosophical, imperatives trump. The reason religion can and does serve as a normative guide to behavior is that it is not a form of philosophy, but a system of belief that binds the believer. (Philosophy is something you can do occasionally, religion is not.)

But aren’t beliefs and philosophies the same things? No they’re not. Beliefs such as “I believe that life should not be taken” or “I believe in giving the other fellow the benefit of the doubt” or “I believe in the equality of men and women” or “I believe in turning the other cheek” are at least the partial springs of our actions and are often regarded by those who hold them as moral absolutes; no exceptions recognized. These, however, are particular beliefs which can be arrived at for any number of reasons, including things your mother told you, the reading of a powerful book, the authority of a respected teacher, an affecting experience that you have generalized into a maxim (“From now on I’ll speak ill of no one.”).

A little philosophy might help Fish think through this more carefully.

In the first place, "philosophy" has a lot of meanings, even in the context of contemporary philosophy, so it's not helpful or meaningful to say "contemporary philosophers" as if they shared some single meaning.

Second, "beliefs vs. philosophies" is an opposition few philosophers would recognize (at least as Fish means it). Perhaps Fish means something like attitudes regarding particular propositions and attitudes regarding attitudes about particular propositions. Those are clearly different, one is whether you endorse proposition p, the other is what you think it means to endorse proposition p. Fish seems to think "philosophy" only regards the latter, the meta view as it were.

But that's not the case. For many philosophers, the subject of which views are the correct ones is indeed a philosophical one. Is it morally permissible, for instance, to tax inherited wealth? An answer to this question might appeal to an abstract principle, in the same way a religious "belief" might do, or it may appeal to something else, in the same way a reglious belief might do. The particularity of the belief in question isn't the point (as Fish seems to think). All of our beliefs,by the way, are particular; and indeed all of them might be subject to the same kind of causal explanation he seems to think critical (at least this is what my mother has always said).

So in the end Fish can't get the idea that some of the stuff philosophy deals with is entirely meta (what is the nature of belief?); some of the stuff it deals with is not meta (looking for an adjective here): is stealing ever just?

Finally, contrary to Fish, philosophy is not optional in the way he imagines it to be. To the extent that you have beliefs at all you're doing philosophy inasmuch as the little thing that stiches your beliefs together–the inference–is a big deal for philosophers. It only appears optional to Fish, I think, because he's doing it wrong.

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Colin, Scott and I are working on a paper for the Ontario Society for the Study of Argumentation conference on the problem of subjunctive inconsistency, or, as we term it, subjunctive tu quoque arguments. The idea was originally Colin's (see here). In a very basic sense, the argument scheme goes like this:

you hold belief x or perform action y, but under different circumstances, you would reject belief x or condemn action y.

This is basically an accusation of hypocrisy, even though in this case the hypocrisy is completely hypothetical. No one is claiming that the accused is actually a hypocrite; merely that the accused would be a hypocrite were the situation different. This might seem odd at first blush (whoever heard of a subjunctive hypocrite?), but it's fairly common, so much so that we have phrases for this kind of judgment: "don't judge a man until you walk a mile in his shoes" or "in my place you'd do exactly the same thing."

I ran across an example of the mishandling of this sort of argument in Stanley Fish's blog column. He writes:

“Presumably,” Pitts retorted with obvious sarcasm, Barbour “would be equally non-judgmental if his state were to consider similar honors to Osama bin Laden, convicted spy Robert Hanssen or Columbine killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold.”

Just what is Pitts demanding here? He is demanding that Barbour earn his right to be non-judgmental with respect to Forrest by being willing to extend the same generosity to bin Laden, Hanssen, Harris, Klebold and literally thousands of others. You can withhold judgment in this instance, he is saying, only if you would also withhold judgment in all arguably equivalent instances. What Pitts is urging (implicitly) is not the condemnation of Ku Klux Klan founders, but the principle that condemnation or the withdrawal from condemnation must be evenhanded. You get the right to say something critical of what someone of the opposite party said or did only if you would be similarly critical when members of your own party said or did something similar. And you get the right to refrain from criticizing some only if you will also refrain from criticizing others.

This is a familiar move in political argument (it is related to the tu quoque, or “so’s your old man” move). We saw it in spades a while ago when Democrats lamented the incivility of public discourse and blamed right-wingers for proclaiming over and over that President Obama was a foreign Islamic usurper working to undermine American values. The right replied by rehearsing the litany of things said by democrats about George Bush — he was a tool of corporate interests, a warmonger and an enemy of civil liberties. So what gives you the high moral ground, those on the right asked, when you were equally vile in your accusations?

I think Fish's description of the logic is right on the mark. Pitts' charge is a tu quoque. The problem, however, is that not all tu quoque arguments are fallacious. This one, I think, is one of those cases. Fish doesn't get this. Skipping several paragraphs (where Fish wrongly alleges that subjunctive tu quoque arguments are instances of the liberal tendency to favor process over content):

Leonard Pitts thinks that the Klan and its views are beyond the pale – “a man who betrayed this country, founded a terrorist group and committed mass murder is a man unworthy of honor” — but he also thinks – this is his mistake — that it is an argument against the honoring of the Klan’s founder that Haley Barbour would probably not give Osama bin laden the same benefit of the doubt he seems willing to give to Forrest. (Of course, Barbour is just playing the familiar game of political equivocation.) To which I say, what does Osama bin Laden have to do with it? Bringing him and the other symbols of wrongdoing in just takes the pressure off the core moral question — was and is the Klan evil — and turns it into a question of formal equivalencies. (Are you also willing to be fair to . . . ; the list is endless.)

At bottom, Pitts’s case against honoring Forrest is that he was a bad man dedicated to realizing a bad cause. Just say that, and don’t mess it up (and dilute it) by playing the “gotcha” card, by challenging Barbour to display his liberal bona fides and accord equal treatment to everybody. That’s not what the moral life is about.

Fish is wrong about the motivation for Pitts' claim. It's not a matter of alleged liberal fairness or obsession with process over content–Fish is just confused about that. We might put it something like this:

Bedford Forrest was a racist murderer, honoring him would be like honoring Bin Laden, and I'm certain Barbour wouldn't want to honor Bin Laden.

Pitts' subjunctive tu quoque argument highlights, rather than obscures, the relevant moral issue: Forrest was a traitor, racist, and terrorist; honoring him is like honoring Bin Laden, so for this reason, Barbour ought to honor Bin Laden. But Barbour wouldn't honor Bin Laden, therefore, etc. In other words, Pitts isn't avoiding making a moral argument by hiding behind process (whatever that means) or playing "gotcha," he's making a moral argument.

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"In what sense" has got to be one of the most basic philosophical questions. It aims, at the very least, to get clear about what we're talking about. Because, as it turns out, words and concepts and such have different senses. Justice, for instance, seems to mean different things. And it would be important to avoid obvious equivocations. So, for instance, if I am talking about a normative notion of justice, and you come back at me with empirical observations about the criminal justice system, I will be confused. This seems to be a really straightforward point. But alas. Here's Stanley Fish, The New York Times' idea of an intellectual:

I don’t think that’s the way it happens or could happen. Let’s say (to give a humble example from literary studies) that there is a dispute about the authorship of a poem. A party to the dispute might perform comparative analyses of the writings of rival candidates, examine letters and personal libraries, research the records of printers and publishers, look at the history of reception, etc. Everyone who engages in the dispute will do his or her work in relation to well-established notions of what counts as evidence for authorship and accepted criteria for determining whether or not the evidence marshaled is persuasive.

But suppose, you think (in the manner of Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault) that the idea of the individual author is a myth that emerges alongside the valorization of property and property rights so central to Enlightenment thought? Suppose you believe that the so-called author is not the source of the words to which he signs his name, but is instead merely a site transversed by meanings neither he nor any other so-called “individual” originates? (“Writing,” says Barthes, “is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin.”)

I am not affirming this view, which has religious (“not me, but my master in me”) and secular (it is the age or zeitgeist that speaks) versions. I am just observing that there are many who hold it, and that for those who do the evidence provided by printers’ records or letters or library holdings will not be evidence at all; for they do not believe in the existence of the entity — the conclusively identified individual author — it aspires to be evidence of. If no one wrote the poem in the sense assumed by the effort to fix authorship, that effort is without a point and the adducing of evidence in the absence of something to be proved will seem quixotic and even perverse.

The example might seem to be to the side of the (supposed) tension between faith and reason, but it is, I believe, generalizable. Evidence, understood as something that can be pointed to, is never an independent feature of the world. Rather, evidence comes into view (or doesn’t) in the light of assumptions – there are authors or there aren’t — that produce the field of inquiry in the context of which (and only in the context of which) something can appear as evidence.

Holy Crap. The "valorization" of property has an empirical component ("your property is valorized at less than it was valorized at before") and a normative component ("your property ought to be valorized at more than it was before") and a conceptual component (your property is valorizable), among other components. The question for the literary studies people is whether some person x wrote some poem y. This is an empirically verifiable fact–just ask Foucault's estate. The question for Foucault, I take it, is whether such knowledge will tell us anything about anything (well, in particular, about the "meaning" of the poem. They're different questions which Stanley Fish has hopelessly confused.

And he has confused these two different sorts of claim in order further to confuse the difference between the methods of faith and the methods of science. They're not, to reorient the analogy where it should (!) be, talking about the same thing. And to make this all a tomayto-tomahto question of evidence just ignores one pretty basic philosophical question.

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Last week’s column about Denis Rancourt, a University of Ottawa professor who is facing dismissal for awarding A-plus grades to his students on the first day of class and for turning the physics course he had been assigned into a course on political activism, drew mostly negative comments.

The criticism most often voiced was that by holding Rancourt up as an example of the excesses indulged in by those who invoke academic freedom, I had committed the fallacy of generalizing from a single outlier case to the behavior of an entire class “Is the Rancourt case one of a thousand such findings this year, or it the most outlandish in 10 years?” (Jack, No. 88).

That's Stanley Fish, the New York Times' interpreter of the academic world. Sounds like he has been accused of a hasty generalization in the form of "nutpicking." I'm not particularly interested in the merits of the charge–Fish seems even to concede it. One minor observation. I'm sure we are all guilty at one point or another for reasoning that badly. The difference is that Fish gets to air out his errors in the New York Times. Anyway, he makes things worse as he defends himself. He writes (following directly):

It may be outlandish because it is so theatrical, but one could argue, as one reader seemed to, that Rancourt carries out to its logical extreme a form of behavior many display in less dramatic ways. “How about a look at the class of professors who … duck their responsibilities ranging from the simple courtesies (arrival on time, prepared for meetings … ) to the essentials (“lack of rigor in teaching and standards … )” (h.c.. ecco, No. 142). What links Rancourt and these milder versions of academic acting-out is a conviction that academic freedom confers on professors the right to order (or disorder) the workplace in any way they see fit, irrespective of the requirements of the university that employs them.

Eegads! "Carrying the behavior to its logical extreme" is the characteristic marker of the slippery slope. And its supported by an alleged fallacy of accident: certain very jerky professors are going to interpret academic freedom very broadly, and, since they will allege this, there must be a logical connection between academic freedom and being a complete nitwit. Well there isn't. Just because the connection is alleged by some–how many, not many I would guess–does not mean the connection obtains. What Fish has done, in other words, is compound the error of one fallacy (the hasty generalization nutpicking variety) with three more:the slippery slope, the fallacy of accident, and the implied hasty generalization again!

Anyone who has gone through the relentless misery known as the academic job market knows that one's political affiliations are the farthest thing from one's mind (and the least likely subject of conversation at any of one's many interviews). One worries rather about the really long CV of one's competitors. Having gone through that myself, I can say that George Will's whining about ideological imbalance in the humanities is uninformed and silly. Speaking of a recent and most likely annoying book by Stanley Fish, he suggests that one ought to study the causes and consequences of there being so many lefties in academia. Laying out his case for affirmative action for conservatives, Will writes:

Fish does not dispute the fact that large majorities of humanities and social science professors are on the left. But about the causes and consequences of this, he airily says: It is all "too complicated" to tell in his book, other than to say that the G.I. Bill began the inclusion of "hitherto underrepresented and therefore politically active" groups.

Then, promiscuously skewering straw men, he says, "these were not planned events" and universities do not "resolve" to hire liberals and there is no "vast left-wing conspiracy" and inquiring into a job applicant's politics is not "allowed" and "the fact of a predominantly liberal faculty says nothing necessarily about what the faculty teaches." Note Fish's obfuscating "necessarily."

The question is not whether the fact "necessarily" says something about teaching but whether the fact really does have pedagogic consequences. About the proliferation of race and gender courses, programs and even departments, Fish says there are two relevant questions: Are there programs "with those names that are more political than academic?" And do such programs "have to be more political than academic?" He says the answer to the first is yes, to the second, no.

The "consequences," however, of this phenomenon have been studied. Turns out, say some, students are unlikely to be indoctrinated. I know I say this a lot, but I'm tired of being called an indoctrinator: I can't even indoctrinate my students to underline or italicize the title of that leftist handbook, The Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics. When they get that, perhaps will move on to my views about race and gender.

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Discussions of bias seem to take on a similar pattern. Aside from the groundless hurling of the "you're biased" accusation, someone will quickly make the claim that "bias" is inevitable and that we all have our own unjustified biases, so why bother. Here is yet another way, the Stanley Fish way, to deal with questions of bias:

I agree that it is important to have a position on such questions of truth, but the classroom is not the place to work that position out; the classroom is, however, the place to consider the efforts of men and women to work it out in the course of centuries. Steven Brence may or may not be right when he announces that an “untenable” Hobbesian notion of individualism is responsible for “much of contemporary conservative thought.” But “untenable” is not a judgment he should render, although he should make an historical argument about conservative thought’s indebtedness to Hobbes. Save “untenable” for the soapbox.

Sarah asks, what good does academic conversation “do us if it does not put us in a better position to assess current theories and thoughts?” It depends what you mean by assess. If you mean analyze, lay bare the structure of, trace the antecedents of, then well and good. But if it means pronouncing on the great issues of the day — yes we should export democracy to the rest of the world or no we shouldn’t — then what she calls assessing I call preaching.

Sarah touches on what is perhaps the most urgent question one could put to the enterprise of liberal education. What, after all, justifies it? The demand for justification, as I have said in other places, always come from those outside the enterprise. Those inside the enterprise should resist it, because to justify something is to diminish it by implying that its value lies elsewhere. If the question What justifies what you do? won’t go away, the best answer to give is “nothing.”

Now I hate to be the guy who draws the facile conclusion, but isn't "laying bear the structure of" a kind of "pronouncing on"? I mean, if I say, "this argument has the structure (and say content) of an equivocation," aren't I pronouncing on it? Or should I not teach logic, because it's biased?